Dean Bonilla Shares Importance of Creating a Socially Conscience Campus
On April 24, 2014, Dean Jaime Bonilla Ríos from Tecnológico de Monterrey visited Armour College of Engineering as a special guest of Dean Natacha DePaola. Tecnológico de Monterrey is located in Monterrey, the capital and largest city in Nuevo León, Mexico. Established in 1943 the University currently has 31 campuses in 25 cities throughout Mexico. Tecnológico de Monterrey serves almost 100,000 students at the high school, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels.
During his visit, Dean Bonilla gave a lecture titled The Challenge of Achieving a Vision of the University. In this lecture Dean Bonilla shared that the key to a University’s success is treating the University vision as a social contract. The University vision should not only consider what is best for the University, but what is best for society as a whole. At Tecnológico de Monterrey, Dean Bonilla stated, their goal is to prepare students to be successful human beings that companies want to hire instead of just preparing future employees.
Tecnológico de Monterrey has achieved great success treating their University vision as a social contract by addressing the individual elements that make up the contract. They have partnered with companies and organizations that share their socially conscious vision. They have hired teachers and created learning spaces that effectively communicate to students of the digital age. Most importantly their vision focuses on addressing contemporary challenges that face all of society.
Dean Bonilla hopes that IIT can learn from the successes at Tecnológico de Monterrey and that his visit will create a platform for collaboration with Armour College and IIT as a whole.
In his closing remarks Dean Bonilla invited IIT students to spend a Summer at Tecnológico de Monterrey working on the numerous research projects going on at the school.
